Yatin Pandya: Residential Township Policy: A review

Lots of construction all around us would certainly set in euphoric sense of progress and development. We need to read between the lines to understand how much of it is growth and what of it is indeed development. The fear is that disguised as development most of these may tend to be merely growth, sometimes even a counter development. One such scheme of the state government needing to be reviewed from holistic perspective is the residential township policy.

Presented as model development and attracting investments from global developers, the scheme needs to be understood in public interest. Number of its riders need to be examined for their interpretative abuses and eventual detrimental outcome. For example few years ago the precursor to this policy was the integrated township policy, where government had even undertaken the responsibility of procuring the land from various owners and provides it to developers. A great boon to developer and tremendous burden for authority. Thankfully government could not adhere to its promised land provisions and scrapped the scheme to introduce newer version as residential township policy.

The current brief of the scheme requires that developers procure land themselves. The land will be solicited, the project will be designed and product will be executed and sold privately.

Minimum area of land for development under the scheme has to be 40 hectare. The development conditions included 60% of land be used for housing, provision of 5% housing for economically weaker sections, amenity provision of 5% and adherence to 5% landmass as open spaces. Developer is to maintain the infrastructure for seven years and then may surrender to authorities. Other provisions include permissible FSI of up to 1.5 and height of 70 metres (23 floors).

If we examine consequences of these riders there are some alarming scenarios emerging requiring immediate attention and major remedial measures. Firstly, demand for minimum of 40 hectare of land implies incentive for large scale consumption of fringe land and most importantly agricultural land. This is not a wise move considering the environmental damage it would contribute to by fast losing cultivable land in proximity of city.

Secondly, the large land parcels implicitly encourage bigger players. Thirdly, large land parcels mean far distances and eventual increased urbanisation of rural areas and long travel time for daily commute, as like American suburbs. The lack of any guidelines for built form or urban design would imply 20 storey high-rises in villages and outskirts, which is absurd city design. Developed under the scheme it would have three times FSI and twice Ahmedabad city's height allowance. A great advantage for developers.

The policy needs to ascertain that roads of adequate width provided at every 400 m grid interval remain public with city level connectivity. With such provisions remaining silent in policy leads to an increased danger for exclusive and gated development.

Also, policy does not ensure land be seen as cultivable resource. Like farmhouse schemes today have remained idle lands with barren plots with hardly worthy vegetation. Considering land as the reproductive resource it should be mandated to provide active farming and agricultural production in large prescribed parcel of land, certainly not the 5% land as open space under present policy papers.

Number of such anomalies need to be objectively reviewed in larger interest rather than immediate gains to ensure co-ordinated and sustainable urban development instead of  agglomeration of profit driven catalogue townships devoid of  ecological, societal and urban form concerns.

— The author is an Ahmedabad-based architect and historian